path: root/blog/posts/discord2/index.md

So [apparently](https://archive.is/PvpAx) Discord will soon force all of its users to submit to invasive age verification in order to have full use of the platform, regardless of whether they're in an area where that's currently required. Also, they're finally [doing an IPO](https://archive.is/IiL2A). In other words, the need to dump Discord is more pressing than ever.

<aside class="aside">
  <div class="aside-image" style="width: 11rem; padding-left: calc(var(--stdpadding) / 2);">
    <img src="/images/reactions/ada/livid.webp" alt="me absolutely fucking livid gripping the wall so hard it's breaking">
  </div>
  <div class="aside-content">
    <p><em>I'm just saying. We wouldn't be here if you all had listened to me back in 2023. But this post isn't about that.</em></p>
  </div>
</aside>

Real isopod h`ead`s know I've [posted about this before](/blog/posts/discord/). Feel free to go and read that for my full case against Discord. This here article, to pull a ChatGPT-ism, isn't about the many fundamental reasons you should be leary of Discord and any platform like it, and it's also not about how fucking bitter I am that we're all even in this situation three years after I wrote my first dissertation on the subject &mdash; it's about what our other options are, right now at this moment.

<figure class="quote">
  <blockquote>
    i think the goal Right Now is to switch from Discord to Literally Anything Better and give time for people actually developing Proper Federated Replacements to build features polish their UX.
  </blockquote>
  <figcaption>
    &mdash; <a href="https://not-brain.d.on-t.work/notes/aind9anvh4gqpj8w">kopper</a>
  </figcaption>
</figure>

Like the article that is now part 1 in a series that is 2 parts 2 long, this post is here to get you off of Discord, but seeing as this goal has become more urgent much faster than the state of alternatives has improved, I'm gonna have to compromise on my ideals a bit this time. The fact is that nothing out there is as good as Discord at what Discord does, so trying to get away from it is going to be an exercise in trade-offs, but it's also not reasonable to expect everyone and their Fortnite group to switch to self-hosted XMPP and WebRTC.

If you're serious about getting away from Discord, you'll need to assess which options work the best for each of your communities, and odds are you'll end up replacing it with more than one alternative. For my part, this post is going to focus mainly on alternatives that replicate Discord's functionality as closely as possible, and would be relatively straightforward drop-in replacements that you could move to right now with relatively (admittedly, that word's doing some heavy lifting here) minimal effort. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of those, but I'll try my best.

I'll admit to having some blind spots here. Namely, I'm aware Discord is available for the latest consoles, and I don't own any of those, so I'm really not qualified to recommend alternatives for that use case, if indeed any exist.

# [Stoat](https://stoat.chat/) (formerly Revolt)

I liked the name Revolt, but [apparently](https://stoat.chat/updates/long-live-stoat) they had to change it after getting a cease and desist over that name. Fair enough, I guess.

Anyway, Stoat is one of the more polished and feature-complete Discord clones I'm aware of. That's not to say it actually *is* either at present &mdash; the rebrand seems to have come with a new, overhauled frontend that isn't entirely finished yet, and all video-related features are still in the works.

However, Stoat is among the easiest of these to adapt to coming from Discord, and it has the benefits of being a) open source and b) not American, the latter of which is especially relevant lately. It's also the only one of the True discord-likes on the list to have any kind of official native mobile app &mdash; though it is very much In Beta and missing quite a lot of features &mdash; and it's the only one so far with discoverability for public ~~guilds~~ Servers, if that matters to you.

# Steam Chat

Valve has the chance to do the funniest thing right now.

Steam has had its own built-in text and voice chat solution for a good long time, and it's been improving as of late. It does have some major downsides: there's no video chat, screen sharing is limited to your Steam games, and messages are ephemeral, disappearing after two weeks. Plus, it's missing most of the Fun Stuff like user-defined custom emotes that you've come to expect from Discord.

Still, if you're looking for a chat solution to use while gaming with your buddies, Steam's built-in functionality is worth a look. In spite of its idiosyncracies, it's polished and mature, and it's even available on mobile, albeit through a separate app from the main Steam one. I wouldn't make a Steam account just to go here, but let's be real, you already have one.

# [Zulip](https://zulip.com/)

The best way I can describe Zulip is as a forum but with Discord vibes. It's a bit of a situational replacement, but if you're using Discord as a forum or a support channel for your open source project, Zulip is almost certainly better. I found out about it because the Polyproto people are using it for this (more on that in a bit).

The main downside with Zulip is that it's got some limitations unless you pay for a subscription (although let's be real, so does Discord), but they will seemingly waive that for open-source projects and in some other cases, and you can self-host it to get rid of most of those limitations if that's up your alley.

# <a href="https://fluxer.app/" id="fluxer">Fluxer</a>

<p class="h2caption">Added on Feb 13, majorly revised on Feb&nbsp;17</p>

Hey what the fuck is going on with Fluxer?

Full transparency, this entry has been updated and moved around a few times, and I no longer know how to feel about this fucking platform. I created an account to poke around on it, and once my registration was approved about a day later (fair enough, it's probably seen a huge influx of users lately) I had fairly positive initial impressions. I initially wrote about them at length here, then I heard someone say it was vibe-coded and dug a bit deeper, only to find that the project's Github repo is a month and a half old with a 9,000+ file initial commit and concluded it was indeed probably vibe-coded, because come on. That looks *insanely* sus.

<figure class="media">
  <img src="vibecodedalert.png" alt="Screenshot of the initial Github commit for Fluxer, indicating that it's from January 1, 2026.">
  <figcaption>"Bro is positively SAUCED off the agentic" &mdash;Live Isopod Reaction</figcaption>
</figure>

But then I posted about this revelation on Fedi and someone who is clearly more qualified to be writing a post like this than me linked [this](https://blog.fluxer.app/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app/), a post on what appears to be the official Fluxer blog (which I swear wasn't linked on the official website until after I started Posting) addressing all of my concerns, indicating that Fluxer dates back about five years, with early builds being tested as long ago as summer of 2023, and further that the one guy behind it, 22-year-old Hampus Kraft, has an impressive résumé of projects in the same wheelhouse, as well as most of a computer engineering degree, and is very much not the stereotypical AI bro that I briefly painted him as.

So here's everything I have to say about Fluxer, and I promise not to replace it with a wildly conflicting statement eighteen hours after publishing:

Fluxer has good UI and UX design that's, as I originally said, *suspiciously* similar to that of Discord, and is therefore probably the easiest thing on this whole list to adapt to coming from Discord. It has a lot of the fun features you've probably grown accustomed to on Discord, like custom emojis, message forwarding, and what appears to be some pretty decent moderation tooling, although I'm not qualified to speak on that last one. The video features seem to actually be present and functional too, which is a nice touch.

From my point of view, the most glaring omissions in its current state are forum channels, discoverability for public communities, account connections besides Bluesky, the soundboard, and several of the dumb fucking cosmetic features that Discord added to make people pay for Nitro. All but the last of those have been stated to be in the works. There's no native mobile app, but there is a PWA. I'm fine with all this. You might not be.

Excitingly, federation is apparently planned for Fluxer in the future, with the hope being for it to be able to do what Matrix failed to. I'm interested to see how that pans out. Encryption is not currently a point of focus, with user experience being a main priority and encrypted DMs as a potential future addition. I'm begrudgingly okay with this &mdash; proper E2EE would make many features that Discord's userbase has come to expect anywhere from much harder to implement to straight up impossible. Tradeoffs.

Fluxer has a paid subscription tier called Plutonium that closely resembles Discord Nitro, and recently sold out of Visionary slots, a $300 one-time payment tier whose primary benefit is a lifetime Plutonium subscription. To be clear, I don't blame Hampus for this. Hosting this stuff is expensive and developing it is hard, and it'll probably end up being a full-time job for him if it's not already, not to mention all the other people he'll probably have to hire to help out if this really takes off. The reality is that a project like this is unsustainable if it isn't funded somehow.

Fluxer, its sole dev, and the company he registered about it are based in Sweden. The project is open source as of January 1, 2026, is licensed under AGPLv3, and Hampus is intentionally trying to make it easier to self-host. These are all selling points for me, as they should be for you. It has a Contributor License Agreement that requires permission to re-license the software under a commercial license, allegedly so that it can be sold to organizations that are unwilling or unable to comply with the terms of AGPLv3. **[Update, Feb 19]** [Not anymore it doesn't!](https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer/commit/3dce089fe2ea372d6f70c024fe060a2afefc4ce2)

That blog post I mentioned actually addresses the vibe-coding allegations. I was gonna restate it here for you, but it would probably be best for you to read the post yourself. I'll even link [the relevant section](https://blog.fluxer.app/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app/#the-llmephant-in-the-room) for you. For the sake of responding to it, the very basics are as follows:

While he does use LLMs for coding, Hampus makes a substantial effort to use them responsibly, evaluating their output like any other contribution, and believes that vibe-coding alone is not enough to make something like Fluxer. The truncated commit history is because development happened in private for more than 3 years, and he didn't want to make that public. He feels conflicted about his use of LLMs and sees it as a compromise to be able to get the project out at all without having to become beholden to venture capital to fund it.

<figure class="quote">
  <blockquote>
    This is my work, and it's hard-earned. If something seems too good to be true, it's because I've put real effort into making it good.
  </blockquote>
  <figcaption>
    &mdash; Hampus
  </figcaption>
</figure>

I have complicated feelings about this answer. Long-time readers will be unsurprised to learn that, bluntly, I don't like vibe coding and I don't trust AI. However, I kind of see where Hampus is coming from, given the scope of the project and that it is currently just him making it. Is he trustworthy? I don't know. I'm not an especially good judge of character. However, he seems to know what he's talking about (at least a lot better than I would) and his heart is in the right place. I said myself that we can't afford to discount a compelling alternative due to ideological purity reasons, and I think this might apply here.

In summary: I want Fluxer to be good, and I want it to succeed. I want it to be better than Discord, and in many ways I believe it already is. My impulse to suspect vibe coding was correct, but only partially, and the dev's justification is compelling to me. I like where his heart's at, and I like what I've seen firsthand of the product. I'm on there and intend to remain on there &mdash; my handle is isopod#0985 &mdash; and I'd be open to paying for Plutonium if the platform becomes a regular part of my comms stack. I strongly recommend that you try it out for yourself.

On the minuscule chance that Hampus is reading this: Sincerely, thanks for all the work you've put into this thing. It seems like you're genuinely passionate about what you're building, and I respect that. Godspeed, and don't fuck this up.

This whole fuckin' saga has been a lesson in doing my proper due diligence and *actually* looking into things before I publish my half-formed opinions on them as some kind of "public resource". My god, nobody hire me as an investigative journalist. Thanks to [sammypanda](https://aus.social/@sammypanda/116084368126714587) for linking me the article that blew my conception of this platform wide open for the second time. We now return to my usual level of journalistic rigor.

# [Osmium](https://osmium.chat/)

<p class="h2caption">Added on Feb 15</p>

Starting to think I was too quick on the draw publishing this a week ago.

Osmium advertises itself as a "globally distributed community messaging and voice/video platform" with encryption "both in transit and at rest". What "distributed" means in this context beyond, like, the extremely standard practice of having servers in multiple countries isn't made clear, but the voice and video part seems to actually be fully up and running (looking at you, Stoat) and to their credit they do acknowledge that "encrypted both in transit and at rest" is different from end-to-end encrypted.

The main thing that gives me pause about Osmium off the bat is that it's still pretty small; the official "community" (server, in Discord parlance) that you get automatically placed in upon signing up is sitting at about 700 total members as of writing, so time will tell how it scales. It's also very much early access software right now &mdash; the UI/UX polish and feature completeness aren't quite up to the level of Fluxer or even Stoat, and the buttons in the UI don't always... do anything.

Also also, Osmium is not currently open source. The main dev, an individual going by [Folf](https://folf.me/), claims that the "client will be open sourced once things are stable", but that's far from the same thing as Fluxer's "open source and you can self-host the backend".

<figure class="media">
  <img src="osmiuml.png" alt="Message from the aforementioned Folf responding to a question about if Osmium is open source: &quot;not at the moment, client will be open sourced once things are stable&quot;">
</figure>

That said, I'm getting the best vibes off of this project on, like, a social level. That default community seems pretty accepting of transgender types, and the dev has expressed eventual intent to add such goodies as explicit support for some sort of Pluralkit-type functionality:

<figure class="media">
  <img src="osmiumw.png" alt="Message from Folf responding to a request for &quot;some kind of like pluralkit alternative built in&quot; by saying &quot;this is planned in the future&quot; and then &quot;one part of the bot API will be to allow bots to set a name/avatar per message&quot;">
</figure>

Osmium probably isn't up to snuff for most yet, but I'm rooting for it. If you're just looking for a place for your group chat full of highly-online queers and can tolerate a bit of jank, this may just be for you. No mobile app, but there is a PWA.

# Honorable Mentions

That there is about everything I could dredge up that mostly fit the brief. I'll admit things aren't looking great here. That said, there are some projects that don't quite fit the above criteria that I feel are worth mentioning.

## [Signal](https://signal.org/)

Signal is the best encrypted messaging service, bar none, and it's not close. All of your communication is end-to-end encrypted using some of the most bulletproof cryptography around (though I'm far from qualified to speak on the specifics), and you should be using it for your Whatsapp-style messaging needs anyway, even in the likely event it can't replace Discord for you.

As mentioned, Signal functions like a Whatsapp clone. It supports your bread-and-butter features like voice and video calls, and some fun stuff like Instagram-style stories and Telegram-style stickers. It requires a phone number to sign up, but you can set a custom username so you don't have to share it with anyone.

## [Polyproto](https://polyproto.org/)

The latest and maybe greatest federated messaging protocol. Made by a bunch of cool queers and seems very promising, but it doesn't seem to actually have any functioning clients as of yet. Still, something to keep an eye on for sure.

## [Spacebar](https://spacebar.chat/)

An attempt at an open source reimplementation of Discord. It's designed to be fully "Discord-compatible", which doesn't mean interoperable, but it does mean that any third party software made for Discord such as bots or alternate clients should be compatible with its APIs.

This seems like an ideal fit for the role of "drop-in replacement for Discord" in theory, but from what I can tell, while functional on some level, it's not really there yet.

### [Update, May 10] [Harmony](https://codeberg.org/MelodyChat/Harmony)

This section previously named [Fermi](https://fermi.chat/) as the preeminent client for Spacebar, but as I've recently been informed, the projects have undergone a sort of meiosis. The developer of Fermi has forked the Spacebar server under the name Harmony on the basis of, to quote their [blog post](https://blog.fermi.chat/blog/2026/04/26/theFuture/) about it, "many long standing organizational issues". Fermi, in turn, has been forked to create a Spacebar-focused version called [Fermo](https://fermo.sovr.top/).

I'm in no position to back either side of this particular schism, and given that neither is seemingly ready to act as a full-on Discord replacement yet, it's not currently of great concern for the purposes of this article. That said, I would like to see at least one of them succeed, if only because more competition in the space is always more better.

## [Mumble](https://www.mumble.info/)

A very mature self-hostable voice chat server. That's about all it does, but if that's all you need out of Discord and you've got a massive nerd like me in your friend group who can set it up it might be worth looking into.

## [Sharkord](https://sharkord.com/)

<p class="h2caption">Added on Feb 15</p>

Another open-source, self-hostable Discord clone currently in alpha. It's in this section primarily because it doesn't currently have an official instance, so much like Mumble and Teamspeak (more on that later) you need someone to host this in order to use it.

# Dishonorable Mentions

And now for some options that suck and aren't really viable in my opinion, but that I feel warrant addressing.

## Matrix

<aside class="aside">
  <div class="aside-image">
    <img src="/images/reactions/ada/sob.webp" alt="me sobbing">
  </div>
  <div class="aside-content">
    <p>You had so much potential! Why did it have to turn out this way?</p>
  </div>
</aside>

Matrix was one of my top picks back in 2023, but it had some unignorable flaws then, and it hasn't really improved in the intervening time. I could opine on this for quite a bit, but suffice to say that the usability and reliability have stagnated while the project's governance has gotten substantially less trustworthy. [This](https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07) and [that](https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked) article do a pretty comprehensive job of explaining it.

**[Update, Feb 11]** Someone pointed out to me that one of those articles is a bit old now, so I went digging for some more recent ones and wouldn't you know it, I found a couple more from mid last year. [Here's](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/im-never-going-back-to-matrix/) [those](https://マリウス.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg/).

**[Update, Feb 15]**

lol

<figure class="quote">
  <blockquote>
    Our efforts are prioritised on our target markets which currently does not include being a Discord replacement
  </blockquote>
  <figcaption>
    &mdash; <a href="https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/issues/5993#issuecomment-3884340391">Element maintainer in a Github comment</a>
  </figcaption>
</figure>

## XMPP

I'd love to recommend XMPP, I truly would, but the UX just isn't there, plus it seems like all its most passionate supporters like it specifically because it doesn't have most of the qualities that make Discord appealing to the average gamer.

IRC is even worse in this regard. It scarcely warrants mentioning.

**[Update, Feb 15]** Apparently an XMPP client called Movim is working towards adding multi-channel group chat functionality in the vein of Discord. Seeing that their website claims support for video chats and screen sharing, I signed up and checked it out for completeness' sake, and I have Thoughts.

Movim isn't a Discord. I think it's trying to be something entirely different. It's got news aggregation, microblogging, Instagram-style stories, and plenty of UX quirks that might be confusing if you're not already ingrained in the XMPP-cosystem. Given that the [PR](https://github.com/movim/movim/pull/1520) to add what they're calling "Spaces" was made literally today, it's very possible that it represents a knee-jerk reactive attempt to capitalize on Discord's fumble and grow their userbase. From what I've seen, I'm not optimistic that it'll work.

## Teamspeak

Yeah, Teamspeak is in fact still kicking. I guess you could use it if you want, but setting up your own server requires either self-hosting or paying someone to host it for you, and their licensing puts artificial limits on what you can do even if you host it yourself. Plus, well, they're a bit of a US military contractor, and proud of it, too, so it's not a great choice if you have principles.

## Roblox Guilded

LOL. LMAO. RIP BOZO

## Slack/Mattermost/Teams

<p class="h2caption">or your half-joking enterprise messaging software suggestion of choice</p>

Be real, you're not serious about this. All of these would be worse than Discord, and besides, I'm pretty sure you need to be an organization and license them or something in order to use them anyway. There's a half dozen things here that have this beat in every respect. Don't debase yourself by seriously entertaining this idea.

Although, I can't deny that it would be funny.

## DCTS

<p class="h2caption">Added on Feb 15</p>

Apparently, this is an acronym for "Direct Communication Through Sockets", which strikes me as a bit of a misnomer since it's obviously not peer-to-peer.

DCTS is *yet another* open-source, self-hostable Discord clone like Sharkord. This one has an official instance, but you'll need to self-host it if you intend to do anything with it beyond putzing around in the official server. Fortunately, that's all anyone reading this will likely want to do, after scrolling up too far in the #spicy-memes channel and seeing the type of shit the lead dev thinks is funny. 

Ignoring the political side, however, the UX is mediocre at best, the featureset is very basic, and the whole interface has a pervasive male-gaze anime girl aesthetic that appeals to a very specific demographic that I'm not in. All in all, if I was gonna spin one of these up myself, it'd be Sharkord, Fluxer, Mumble, or even Teamspeak long before I touched this pile of radioactive sludge again.

## Root

<p class="h2caption">Added on Feb 18</p>

Root is a fascinating specimen. It's a Discord clone in a slightly looser sense, that bills itself as a "platform for communities that do more". What this seems to mean in practice is that in addition to text and voice channels, a Root community can have "app channels", which occupy a role similar to Discord bots, except that they run "natively inside the platform", so on Root's backend rather than relying on the dev to host it, and can present a totally custom GUI to users. These app channels aren't available to the general public as of writing, but they sound to me like a genuinely neat feature with loads of cool applications and seem to be the main thing setting Root apart.

Root currently has the basic trifecta of voice, video, and screenshare, but only the basics &mdash; Unlike Stoat, Fluxer, and Osmium, it doesn't even have custom emojis. Also, screenshare is broken on Linux. Talk about a Discord clone, lol. The interface is plenty polished, but it's also a completely different layout &mdash; everything's been moved around, and I'm not sure it's for the better. There's a bit of a learning curve here.

Not only does Root have native desktop and mobile apps, it's also *only* usable via the native apps &mdash; there's no web interface. This may present a problem if you're worried about resource usage &mdash; after an hour the app had climbed to 1.7GB of RAM used &mdash; and on top of that, it just seems sketchy to me. I wouldn't be surprised if one of their avenues for monetization was collection and sale of user data. And they will need to monetize, since Root is [VC-backed](https://pressreleases.triplepointpr.com/2025/06/17/root-raises-9m-in-funding-to-build-a-next-gen-discord/). That alone is enough for me to recommend that you steer clear, but also of note is that the company is headquartered in Los Angeles, so if you're trying to get away from American tech, Root is an atrocious choice.

# Conclusion

I'd love to be able to give you some better news. I want so badly to be able to say that there's something obvious you can switch to that's just as good or better in the ways that matter \*cough cough TWITTER\* with encryption, and federation, and open source to boot, but as far as I'm aware this is kind of it.

With this decidedly sub-optimal state of affairs in mind, my call to action is this: Look into these alternatives &mdash; test them out, as a group if you can, see if one or multiple can work for you and your friends. If you're of the especially nerdy sort, maybe spin up one of the self-hostable options for your buddies, or contribute code to the projects on the list that are accepting it. And finally, for the love of Glob, cancel your fucking Nitro. *Don't financially reward Discord for this shit.* ***I promise you don't need it.***

<div class="buttons" style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
  <img src="discord-no-way-2.gif">
</div>

---

Also, whatever you end up doing, [here](https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter)'s a utility that can export your Discord chat history to a locally stored file. Do with this what you will.